Repairing a Damaged File system?

[joebhoy]

Just a thought. REmove all but the 2 drives and ensure the cabling is correct. I'm assuming they are IDE drives. ensure the C: drive is on the prmary channel of the cable and the D: drive is on the secondary channel. check jumper settings as well.

[dandnsmith]

Reading the original post, and then the follow ups reminds me of a machine which was the one I'm now working on before a total rebuild.
I used to reckon to have problems, do a total restore to a clean formatted system partition (having the data safe elsewhere), and then carry on - at intervals or 2 to 3 weeks.
I tried PSU (worth thinking about), memory, and then the complete works with mobo, cpu, HDD and RAM - after which it has been stable.

I think you should try soak-testing memory (memtest) and possibly a new PSU.

Reasoning is that something is causing the disk errors, and the new HDDs suggest that there may be a problem elsewhere. The obvious cause is usually an area of RAM causing miswrites to vital filesystem areas.

[Bugsy_malone 666]

Originally Posted by dandnsmith

Reading the original post, and then the follow ups reminds me of a machine which was the one I'm now working on before a total rebuild.
I used to reckon to have problems, do a total restore to a clean formatted system partition (having the data safe elsewhere), and then carry on - at intervals or 2 to 3 weeks.
I tried PSU (worth thinking about), memory, and then the complete works with mobo, cpu, HDD and RAM - after which it has been stable.

I think you should try soak-testing memory (memtest) and possibly a new PSU.

Reasoning is that something is causing the disk errors, and the new HDDs suggest that there may be a problem elsewhere. The obvious cause is usually an area of RAM causing miswrites to vital filesystem areas.

see now seems to make some sense some of that, I have a few reasons myself I think I could have problems with other hardware now.

basically roll back 2 years before this PC was built, bought a brand new ATi Radeon 9800 and got an upgraded cooler kit(quite power hungry as it needed an extra power socket like the hard drive has!), stuck it on my old pc which only had like a 230watt power supply so after a year the power supply had it.

I then got the new bits for this pc all from overclockers(except the radeon) built it, ran lovely and for 2 years its been a perfect machine, then the 80gb hard drive I had built the machine with started to click a bit and have trouble reading later segments of the disk (it was partitioned into 3 and when you accessed the data on the 3rd partition you`d get issues, also playing the game the simms2 would give it issues, that was installed on the 3rd partition)

this is the point where I bought 2 new hard drives, started moving data to the 250gb ended up sticking the new 80gb drive in id also bought and the start of my trouble.

about 14 months ago i got a 256mb ram stick off ebay (to add to my current 512+256 sticks) and still no problems.

Like you say its almost like sticking the extra drive in there is draining power more than the PSU can handle or something.

now another thing I have just tried, is what someone else here had suggested about using the windows recovery consol, I must point out that my 250gb hard drive I'm having issues with is purely a drive for storage, therefore the XP recovery consol will only work on the operating system drive(s) so there for it wont work.

I just find it odd that it just seems to like lose the MBR when i turn the PC off, surely thats something that doesnt change?

now relating to the fact it could also be a read/write motherboard fault is the fact that after trying the windows recovery consol when i rebooted the machine, it check all the drives where present on the first page of start up, then it showed the IRQs and that, then (because I have set up the boot order like this) it said "boot from CD:" obviously no CD so it then boots from HD but it just hung. 5 minutes later it still hadnt done anything.

So unplug the 250gb power,restart it and it boots fine upto windows, so plug the 250gb HD back in restart and once again, here I am writing on the internet, however the 250gb is still inaccessable.

So the questions here really are, what can I do about my 250gb? is there some sort of fix to fix additional hard drive MBRs?

I'm thinking this PC is now on the 2-2.5 year old mark, I can probably stick a new mobo/chip/ram/vid card/power supply in for about 150 quid, is it worth messing about with this machine?

The biggest thing I find odd is the fact its the new `big drive` the main system drive has been fone for the 3 months since I installed them both, could the drive even be faulty?

cheers for all your help guys, its much appreciated!

[dandnsmith]

Originally Posted by Bugsy_malone 666

I just find it odd that it just seems to like lose the MBR when i turn the PC off, surely thats something that doesnt change?
....

So the questions here really are, what can I do about my 250gb? is there some sort of fix to fix additional hard drive MBRs?
....

You have a problem with nomenclature here - Msoft are largely to blame for this historically.
The first block on a drive holds both boot code and the drive partition record.
The first block on each partition holds the partition boot record.

If you want to use fixmbr from the recovery console, it can only affect the boot code for the primary hard disk - this is often what stops a system booting. To use it on another drive, you would have to make that the 'first' drive before running the recovery console.

However what you are needing to do is repair the drive partition record, which isn't a function for fixmbr.

There are some tools to help with the partition record - see UBCD or System Rescue CD. There are also some others, which may cost money but are more to your way of thinking (if you don't 'know' linux) - I saw one yesterday, but have yet to recover the memory (the poster was full of praises, after it fixed his problems with a messed-up drive).

[spangle]

It sounds like your PSU to me. 350w isn't enough to drive the amount of drives you have with an xp2500 + high power gfx card. Also if it's a cheap PSU it won't be pushing 350w, more like 300w-320w. By cheap I mean anything under about 60 UKP. If it's a know brand like Tagan then it will hit it's stated wattage output.

The data recovery tool I use is getdataback from runtime software. It's saved my clients trashed data more times than I can remember.

HTH

[Bugsy_malone 666]

strange you say about the power supply, I actually ordered a 550watt one today (it was cheap but people have been testing them with much newer machines no problems)

but do you think the power supply being on its limit all the time could have caused problems with the first hard drive and infact theres nothing wrong with it?

[Analoguesat]

You saifd the original drive was clicking didnt you. Thats ALWAYS bad!